The story of the lost child

Most who seek to read The Story of the Lost Child will already be firmly in the grip of ‘Ferrante fever’, a current of enough strength that it has apparently swept James Franco along in its swell and has spawned its own Twitter hashtag. The Story of the Lost Child is the fourth and final novel in the Neapolitan Quartet, the last hit of what the Sunday Times has called ‘the publishing story of the decade’ and that the Observer counts as ‘the first work worthy of the Nobel prize to have come out of Italy for many decades’. Indeed, the four books are written as a continuous epic of 1,700-plus pages and nothing about them is designed for bite-size consumption. Their fascination lies not just with the anonymity of their author, whose identity remains a locked-away mystery; but in the intensity of the friendship between the two now-women, Lenù and Lila, who its readers first met as young children in My Brilliant Friend. Their union has warped, split and been conjoined again throughout their epic story, this time coming under strain as they individually and collectively grapple with the responsibilities of adulthood. Spoilers abound about the story’s close, but will not be found here, only that it rests on a conclusion that is resonant, disquieting and brutal, as has been so much of the girls’ interactions and environment in post-war Naples.